Immigration

I was at the BBC studios in MediaCity, Salford, this morning to take part in a radio discussion about immigration. Well, not about immigration itself, but the campaign currently being run by the Tory part of the government (their Liberal Democrat coalition partners are distinctly queasy about it) to show how hard they are regarding illegal immigrants.

Maybe it is a coincidence – and I know Godwin's Law might be invoked here – but yesterday was the anniversary of Zigeunernacht – the night of 2/3 August 1944 when the Gypsy Family Camp (The Zigeunerlager) at Auschwitz-Birkenau was ‘liquidated’. 2,897 men, women and children of Roma or Sinti origin were murdered in the gas chambers by the Nazis, their corpses being burned in pits. Of the 23,000 Gypsies imprisoned within the camp, it is estimated that around 20,000 were ultimately murdered.

Well, it all began with the corruption of language. That's how propaganda works. You change the associations and re-align semantics in order (often subliminally) to change perceptions and manipulate affections. So, yes, I have banged on about language many times before now – and, no, I am not suggesting that the government's current immigration campaign will inevitably lead to another holocaust. But, what I failed to get across coherently on the radio this morning is this:

We need a full, informed and intelligent public debate about immigration, and not the current polarised, nasty slanging match in which parties compete to be the 'hardest'.

We must distinguish between the 'issue' of immigration and the current campaign by the government. Immigration is a good thing and without it Britain would be stuffed. Our wealth has been created (for good and ill) by immigrants to this country in recent centuries.

It is a nasty little distraction to compensate for complete failure by governments to establish, monitor and run an effective immigration policy by targeting a few illegal immigrants with a crude campaign.

If effectiveness is important in evaluating any policy, then this one must surely be doomed. How many 'offenders' have turned themselves in so far? We are getting daily updates on numbers of 'immigration offenders' on the Home Office's twitter feed, so why not a daily update on the numbers of those handing themselves over?

Isn't it the great British addition to maintain that people are innocent until proven guilty? Then why are these people called 'immigration offenders' when they can only be 'suspected immigration offenders'? And how many of them are turning out to be people whose applications for asylum or right to remain are held up in the massive and endless backlog queues at the Home Office?

Net migration is not a problem. Yet, from time to time we hear that we are not getting enough immigrants to met the needs of our economy. Why are immigrants being targeted (and impugned as a financial and social burden) – and why is this being coupled with welfare costs or burdens on the NHS?

These are just some of the questions hanging around. The real issue, however, has to do with the motivation for this unpleasant political campaign. And it is political. It is a macho PR stunt that will achieve little, but cause real damage to language, culture and community. It relies on the sort of categorisation of 'sorts of people' that dehumanises them by association – thus rendering them subject to 'different' values of behaviour or treatment.

The point is that the campaign with the vans, the twitter feed and the selective picking on people at London stations (based on crude racial profiling – if you are not white, you are fair game for stopping and checking) contributes to a coarsening of perceptions about immigrants, regardless of whether they are legal or illegal. It increases fear on the part of immigrants, creates a culture of suspicion and 'anti-otherness', and achieves nothing of any positive purpose.

It all begins with the corruption of language and the confusion of issues. 'Illegal immigrants' morphs into 'immigrants' and the categorisation has begun.

Has any Home Office minister ever visited airport deportation centres and sat down with frightened people to listen to their human story? Aha! But, there's the rub: that would humanise the 'illegal immigrant' and make it harder to get rid of him/her.

If the government wants to address immigration, it should do so by sorting out a workable policy and ensure that those who do apply for asylum or a right to remain are treated humanely, efficiently and effectively – and, if appropriate, prevented from entering the country in the first place. To distract attention with displays of hardness has everything to do with political PR and little to do with reality – except for those whose reality is to be a victim of the campaign.

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17 Responses to “Immigration”

Immigration AND the Muslim religion (most of whose adherents inherit their faith) are both being used as surrogates for racism. Race is a decidedly dodgy concept. I seem to recall that some UN agency, basing its declaration on science, told us there is a human race, with Australian aborigines perhaps significantly different. But our genetic differences are so minimal as to make talk about race as a biological concept a nonsense.

One depressing similarity between cultures is socially artificial stratification: women commonly being regarded as inferior, gay/homosexual people likewise, those from other cultures regarded as inferior and racially different.

You’re absolutely right, Bishop Nick, that the current publicity of HMG’s campaign (the Lib Dems may say they object, but they haven’t led a recall of Parliament to stop it) is based on crude racial profiling. Canadians, New Zealanders, those from the predominantly white commonwealth are not being targeted.

The principal effects of this publicity – which I suspect is at the behest of Mr Cameron’s new Australian advisor – is to make those who feel like immigrants (including some who are several generations from roots in the West Indies/Africa etc) feel uncomfortable, even though they are here quite legally and, of course, to undermine UKIP on their most popular “policy.”

I gather 83% of UKIP supporters (who are a mere 11-13% of those who would vote in a Commons general election tomorrow) favour their party on such grounds. UKIP’s only posters I saw in Eastleigh were scaremongering about Rumanians and Bulgarians.

50/51% of voters as a whole put immigration as one of their 3 most important policy areas. The Economy is ahead of that while the EU is a fair way behind.

I think that many are hardening in their determination to see those who act so cynically – let alone ineffectually so far as catching those who exploit illegal immigrants is concerned – out of government for another generation.

It is claimed that these vans etc are being deployed on an “intelligence led” basis.

Perhaps the Inland Revenue might act similarly, and roust the pubs of the City of London at Lunchtime to round up tax “avoiders” and evaders? Or the floor of the Stock Exchange? But then Bankers are the prime source of funds for the tory party again, so that might mitigate against such folly.

I would go along with all this, but as is so often the case with the opposition parties at the moment, no one puts forward a coherent strategy. If there is illegal immigration which the government says there is, how should we deal with it? If we don’t like what is going on at the moment, what is Labours answer? It came up on Any Questions, and no one seemed able to come up with a coherent strategy, mad Michale Howard carried the floor.

It’s part of the nature of parliamentary democracy that those who are in opposition avoid commitments so as to reduce their outline to government blunderbusses and sharpshooters. In fact one of the reasons why Tony Blair is referred to as “the Master” by Cameron and Osborne was adeptness in doing this. Mimicry is flattery.

The fact that the ONS has admitted that the in/out statistics remain open to very large inaccuracies hasn’t protected Labour from accusations that they were responsible for a large immigration of what in practice were cheap workers. I knew some, some went back to … wait for it! Rumania (here on an Italian passport) and some Poles moved on to Sweden. One after marrying a Sri Lankan.

We Brits need to get over ourselves (as they say). It is one World, there is one God (worshipped in various ways) and we are one human race. We are the vanguard of humanity, perhaps. I certainly pray so.

Surely it is anti-intellectual to suggest something that can clearly and clearly often has lead to violence, distrust, and ill-feeling is de facto a “good thing”. Not to mention the fact that it can often lead to dispossession of other groups. I don’t think European migration to South and North America in 16th-19th Centuries was a “good thing”. That is nonsense.

In your piece you state that others should avoid propagandising, but your own writing lapses into exactly that.

“and without it Britain would be stuffed.”

Propaganda.

“Our wealth has been created (for good and ill) by immigrants to this country in recent centuries.”

Propaganda

“Net migration is not a problem.”

Propaganda

“(based on crude racial profiling – if you are not white, you are fair game for stopping and checking)”

Funny! How come Russians and Ukrainians have been stopped and arrested then?? Again your statement above is clearly propaganda, and is intended to be racially provocative by inferring a *racial* motive where the facts prove that one does not exist – especially when “racial” in our language carries associations with Nazi pseudo-scientific “racism”, which of course is unrelated to one’s separate ethnic sense of identity (ethnicity). All humans should have the right to express their sense of ethnicity (which is inevitably to some degree territorial) in a sensible manner. So really, all this stuff about “racism” is all the most serious and most unpleasant propaganda COMING FROM YOU, and is intended to play on senses of guilt, and is a crude and emotive exploitation of people’s senses of guilt. Traditional ecclesiastical guilt-mongering and exploitation for the purposes of self-promotion.

“The point is that the campaign with the vans, the twitter feed and the selective picking on people at London stations contributes to a coarsening of perceptions about immigrants, regardless of whether they are legal or illegal. It increases fear on the part of immigrants, creates a culture of suspicion and ‘anti-otherness’, and achieves nothing of any positive purpose.”

I do think you are totally wrong here, and failing to judge the public mood, which is a very strong sense that government is not “on our side” when it comes to migration, and that there is a very strong class of people who have a material interest in promoting migration and insisting that any hint or expression of white British ethnic self-protection is morally unacceptable or “racist”. That sense that the elite doesn’t care about the people is most likely to coarsen perceptions and promote inter-ethnic strife. Giving people a sense that the state is strong and capable enough to protect ethnic British people’s sense of self and sense of what territory is “ours”, is of course very important for the purposes of peace, and really it is you who is trying to increase division with constant provocative use of the word “racism” and a rather sad and pathetic belief (?) or pretense that you would have the power to mediate between groups in a wildly balkanising nation, when that is clearly not the case.

Basically if you want to play on people’s senses of guilt to try and promote yourself, why not pick on the traditional Christian topics (e.g. sex), rather than race.

Thought about immigration tonight when I went out to dinner. Stood on corner with four restaurants, three started and run by immigrant families. Hard to stand there and not think that my life is better because of immigration.

I feel I have to ‘bang on’ too, as I’m sure I’ve commented on this before.

We all have immigrant roots in this country – even if they go back thousands of years. Michael Wood is about to present a series on the “Anglo-Saxons” – they were not just immigrants but invaders.

Yes, our wealth in this country can be attributed to immigrant labour in one form or another (one form being slavery). Certainly, many skilled craftworkers have been coming as asylum seekers from the middle ages onwards to Britain. They have helped boost the economy from that time and have done since then.

Much of this ‘discussion’ about race, immigration (illegal or otherwise) seems to take the view that everyone in the UK is anxious about this issue. It’s not high on the discussion list north of the border. So i would welcome a real discussion about immigration but one that included the devolved nations views too and not just the usual suspects from London and the south. Or perhaps I’m being racist here?

I got stopped at immigration in Dover for the first time in ages this summer. Probably because, living in Hungary. I replaced my UK-registered Opel with a Hungarian-registered VW. I explained that we were there on a family holiday, and to attend my son’s graduation. I didn’t really mind. but wondered why the next car had been pulled over. It was UK-registered, but its occupants were ‘British Asians’. Why, we thought, were no ‘white’ occupants of UK-registered cars stopped? There were many white people of foreign nationality on the ferry, driving off in UK-registered cars. Why does immigration control still come down to skin colour when it comes to ‘random checks’?, I asked myself.

Question for Heather: how many immigrants are there in Scotland? (and for the purpose of this question let’s say an immigrant is a person not born in the UK, no more than that – so Hardeep Singh Kohli (say) would be regarded as a non-immigrant).

I think that the proportions will be relatively small put next to parts of southern England – and that may partly explain why it’s not such a big issue in Scotland.

I’m not Heather, but from the ONS statistics (it’s a table called Population by Country of Birth and Nationality), in 2011, the population born outside the UK for various English regions apart from London varied between 5-13%, with Yorkshire & the Humber 9%, for example, the North-East lowest at 5% and South-East highest at 13%. For Scotland it was 7%, Wales 5%, Northern Ireland 6% (although that included a lot of people born in the Republic of Ireland). For London, 56% of the population were born outside the UK and 41% outside the EU. So essentially, immigration is two stories: London and the rest of the UK. And I suspect in Scotland itself, there would also be wide regional variation.

Thank you magistra. Of course, statistics are like a bikini (what they conceal is far more interesting than what they reveal), and as you say, a broad regional figure of 10% might conceal hotspots where immigrants make up much more of the population (eg Boston in Lincolnshire).

One senses that the success of UKIP and the scummy Daily Express is based on portraying such hotspots as the reality everywhere. Time to call them for the liars that they are…

Becky, thanks for this. I did read your piece (sitting in a cafe beside Lake Maggiore – the only place I can find that has free wifi). Good stuff and your outrage is shared by me. I see that the vans have now been pulled and that a commitment has been made not to do any similar campaigns “without consultation” beforehand – whatever that means.